• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Skidmore College Creative Matter English Honors Theses English 5-7-2020 Repressing Deviance: The Discourse of Sexuality in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Portrait of Dorian Gray Olivia Blake Mendlinger [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/eng_stu_schol Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Mendlinger, Olivia Blake, "Repressing Deviance: The Discourse of Sexuality in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Portrait of Dorian Gray" (2020). English Honors Theses. 39. https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/eng_stu_schol/39 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Creative Matter. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Creative Matter. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Skidmore College Repressing Deviance: The Discourse of Sexuality in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Portrait of Dorian Gray Olivia Blake Mendlinger EN 375 The “Other” Victorians Professor Barbara Black 28 April 2020 Foreword No matter what we call it – a person’s soul or their personality – the “stuff” that makes up who we are has been a topic of debate going back eons. What philosophers and scientists of every age agree on is that many aspects make up our personalities, not just a single attribute. According to Jungian psychology,1 these different personality aspects are explained through the study of individuation, the sum of separate, but equal, parts in a single person. Growing up on a diet of heroes and villains like most twenty-first-century children, I learned to distill those parts into two overarching concepts: good and evil. Of course, these are not new concepts by any means, as the basics of good and evil predate almost everything. Since beginning my studies in British literature, I find the nineteenth century depictions of duality particularly fascinating. On the coattails of the British Romantics, the Victorians took the known ideas of good and evil to new levels. They propelled beliefs of purity and deviance to new highs and even more extreme lows, especially within a single soul. After placing those “pure” parts on pedestals, they then tried to stamp out all that was “evil.” In doing so, the Victorians created a new duality within themselves, but that duality was out of balance. By suppressing half their soul, the Victorians created a monstrous “other” within themselves. Fascinated by their repressed desires, many “othered” Victorian writers took up their pens in protest. Their writing showcases what happens to the soul when individuation is not balanced, creating the dark, Victorian Gothic. Robert Louis Stevenson portrayed this intense dichotomy in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) as the struggle between the “light” and “dark” tendencies in men. Four years later, Oscar Wilde found this dualism in his study of aestheticism in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890): what is “beautiful” versus what is “ugly.” 1 For more on individuation, see Andrew Colman’s entry on the subject in the Oxford Reference Dictionary: A Dictionary of Psychology, 4th ed., 2015. Mendlinger 1 A century later, historian and philosopher Michael Foucault theorized that the “darkness” or “ugliness” the Victorians tried to suppress was sexuality. What these two Gothic authors and Foucault seem to agree on, however, is that darkness and light, ugliness and beauty, sexuality and asceticism, cannot exist without the other. If this is true, then my question about dualism is thus: what happens to that darker nature when it is not allowed the room to grow? More specifically, I wonder what happens to the monsters we create when the power of that repression is disrupted? By paying close attention to the dualism and aestheticism of these Gothic novels, the voices of the silenced monster and the “dark” nature of sexuality are heard. Mendlinger 2 Sexuality, Repression, and Power: the Discourse of Michael Foucault If the Victorians were masters at repressing sexuality as a dark impulse, Foucault was a master of freeing it. In 1976, he published a three-book doctrine, History of Sexuality, which documented sexuality as a source of power throughout time. The transformation of sexual desire into discourse began well before there was an ascetic need for it. For example, in the seventeenth century, a discourse on sex was the rule, not the exception (20). This seventeenth-century or older “Christian” pastoral was practiced by the elite ruling classes that could afford to go to confession every Sunday. They made it their prerogative to transform their every desire into discourse, as though it was their fundamental duty (21). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, sexual discourse turned away from spiritual incitement and towards the political, economic, and technical (23). Sex and sexuality went from theoretical discourse to practical discourse, something to analyze and classify, both professionally and casually. Morality, which had often been the focal point of discussion in the 1600s, was left conveniently out of the conversation as sex became a function. Sex was “inserted in all systems of utility, made to function at an optimum,” as it was necessary for the rise and fall of the population (24). The more populated an empire, the more powerful. Discourse on sex became a system of necessity and power. As with any system, sex had to be managed and therefore became a system that needed policing. The goal of policing of sex was not a depressive order, but an ordered maximization (24). The policing of sex was not taboo but instead made into public and scientific discourse. In the nineteenth century, the discursive nature of sex bled into almost every area of discourse, from economics, medicine, pedagogy, justice, and others, from the lower classes up to the high nobility and holy clergy (33). The perpetual discourse of sexuality became the norm at Mendlinger 3 every level. Foucault believes that there is no single sexual discourse, but a “multiplicity” of them (33). This multiplicity, of course, did not end in the nineteenth century as we would assume, but instead became censored as the language of the discourses changed. According to Foucault, what separates the three centuries is the “wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it” (34). The incitement to speak of sex was everywhere. However, the Victorians placed oppressive prohibitions on themselves, seemingly silencing the discourse. They lifted these prohibitions only in cases of extreme necessity, such as for economic pressure or political purposes. However, the everyday language of sexual discourse changed into a coded secret language (34). The invented devices to talk around sex became the new discourse, and the openness of sexuality faded into the background of Victorian society. Mendlinger 4 Sexual Discourse in the Time of Victoria The repression of homosexuality, as Foucault sees it, begins with the Victorians. He tracks that at least as far back as the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was still a certain openness, a realism concerning sexuality. It was a time of open transgressions when people had a “familiarity with the illicit” (3). When the Victorians came into power two hundred years later, this familiarity with sex was forgotten, and sexuality become something to fear. Sexuality was confined to the intimacy between man and wife, in the sanctity of their marriage bed. Anything outside that sense of normalcy, of secrecy, was deemed intolerable as silence became the rule (3). In this new age of repression, sex and sexuality were reduced and denied, driven out by the very people who practiced it. In a sense, sex did not just cease to exist, but it ceased to have the right to exist (4). Sex was deemed criminal, judged in the societal court, and sentenced to the reality of the invisible man: there, in the places we dare not look, but are never seen. Repression, in essence, is a sentence to disappear (4). What the Victorians seemingly forgot as they fought against the “evil” of sexuality is that when repressing something, that repression becomes the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and taboo (5). Because sex is an age-old necessity to the continuation of species, it cannot just be blinked out of existence, as hard as the Victorians might have tried. The forced repression inevitably breeds outlets of sexuality, where those who felt the pull of the darkness could go to have their secret desires filled. These outlets of desire where people were allowed to exist in the darkness manifested in brothels and mental hospitals. These were locations where sexuality was not only expected to be limitless but deeply explored. Concessions of repression like the brothel or mental hospital, where sexuality was deemed acceptable, had to exist in order for the repression to hold any power (5). In these few places there was a knowledge of sexuality, Mendlinger 5 openness, and freedom to the speech of sexuality that was otherwise only present in the sanctity of the parents’ bedroom. In these places, repression held no sway. Once outside these footholds, the “reality” of Victorian society set in; the silence, the cold puritanism, propriety without warmth, held no knowledge of what people did in the dark. Without knowledge of the illicit, repression becomes dominant once again. Foucault postulates that one reason the Victorians were so insistent on silencing their sexuality was in the deliberate attempt to create transgression. With sexuality outlawed to the dark corners of society, being able to speak of sex in a forbidden place becomes adventurous, even dangerous. The thrill of the anticipated freedom of being in a place outside the law is a rush for the otherwise continually repressed Victorian (6).

Load more

  31

Copy Link